parker higgins

As the “father of information theory,” Claude Shannon’s contributions to the development of modern digital technology are hard to overstate. That work puts him in the ranks of the Einsteins, Turings, and Feynmans of the world; somehow, though, he never seemed to get the credit and public recognition that those scientists received.

One of my goals while at Recurse Center has been to improve my ability to manipulate and visualize data sets. To that end, I’ve been toying around with the Social Security Administration’s baby name dataset, which records the number of babies born with each given name every year, both federally and at the state level. Because I’ve also been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation along with the Treks And The City podcast, I chose to dig into information about the name “Wesley.”

The Internet Archive hosts an incredible collection of over 25,000 professionally digitized 78rpm records. The great thing about a catalog that large is that, if you know what you want, you’re likely to find it. On the other hand, if you just want to browse it can be overwhelming and even intimidating. Each item could possibly be a delight, but it’s difficult to even think about individual records in the face of such a huge archive.

Just a quick meta note: I’ve moved this site to a new hosting situation, but there shouldn’t be any disruption to its availability. I’ll probably also be looking into different CMS options while I’m here at Recurse Center.

After I posted yesterday about my automated datamoshing experiment, I got a nice message on Twitter from developer and botmaker Ryan Bauman who was able to run my script on his own videos. We talked for a bit about how it could be improved, and I had a major realization that I had to test immediately.

Datamoshing is a glitch art technique applied to videos to intentionally create “pixel bleeding” and other digital motion artifacts. It became popular several years ago when it was used in near-simultaneous music videos by Chairlift and Kanye West. In those cases, and in the tutorials and techniques documented since then, the glitches are typically introduced to a single edited video, and done manually in a visual editing program.

Twitter users who want to ensure that the Wayback Machine has stored a copy of the pages they link to can now sign up with @LinkArchiver to make it happen automatically. @LinkArchiver is the first project I’ve worked on in my 12-week stay at Recurse Center, where I’m learning to be a better programmer.

As the federated social network Mastodon has surged in popularity over the last month, more than a thousand instances — ranging from a single user to tens of thousands — have been started by the community.

A Ninth Circuit copyright decision in Mavrix v. LiveJournal could bring nasty implications for online communities, threatening the copyright “safe harbor” provisions that allows those communities to form.

This week I went to the SFMOMA for the first time. It’s great! I spent hours there and felt like I had to rush to see even a fraction of the collection. One of the pieces that really struck me was Gerhard Richter’s massive 1974 painting “256 Colors” (or “256 Farben” in his original German). I took a picture of it there: